Les Paul: In Memoriam

Les Paul died on 12 August 2009, at the age of ninety-four. Nobody would dispute the fact that his most creative years were well behind him, but just as indisputable was the man's tireless energy and enthusiasm for playing music. Indeed, Paul was in the midst of a kind of renascence at the time of his death. His 2005 album, American Made World Played, credited to Les Paul and Friends, featured a bevy of high-profile musicians collaborating and paying tribute to the guitarist, and won two Grammy awards for best pop instrumental and best rock instrumental performance. The 2007 film, Les Paul: Chasing Sound , aired as part of the PBS series, American Masters, and provided an insightful overview of Paul's long career, much of which was drawn from the filmmakers' extensive interviews with Paul. In late 2008, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored Paul as part of their American Music Masters series for his innovations in electric guitar design and sound recording techniques, as well as his performing and recording legacy.

Of course, for those who followed Paul more closely, perhaps the most enduring part of his late-career achievements was the weekly appearance he made, first at Fat Tuesday's nightclub, and then at the Iridium, both in the heart of Manhattan. Between the two, he had a regular standing gig in New York City for over twenty-five years at the time of his death. The Iridium shows particularly became crowd-pleasing events. Even though his right arm was all but frozen into position from injuries Paul had suffered in a 1948 car accident and subsequent degeneration, he continually proved himself to be a resourceful musician who knew countless popular songs, never hesitated to improvise on a familiar melody, and was generous almost to a fault in inviting special guests to share the stage with him. Anyone who attended one of these shows knows that Paul remained a dedicated entertainer until his last days, someone who was always ready with a joke or a story—many in notably bad taste, Paul seeming to relish the role of the dirty old man—to keep the crowd laughing between songs.

Paul's way with a joke was a long-standing talent, but in the prime of his career he was known for much more. He had a hand in developing two of the most significant music technological innovations of the twentieth century: the solid body electric guitar and the use of multiple track recording techniques. His efforts regarding the former led to the creation of one of the most iconic musical instruments ever produced, the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which made his name familiar to thousands upon thousands of musicians and music fans who may never have heard a lick of Paul's own music. Paul's pursuits with recording technology, in turn, left their imprint on almost all of the popular music created after 1950. He furthered the process whereby recording tools became considered instruments unto themselves, as crucial to contemporary music production as more standard instruments or even the human voice (which was itself subject to radical manipulation through Paul's work with his wife and collaborator, the singer Mary Ford).

What connects Les Paul's endeavors as an inventor with his music and his performing career is an overriding preoccupation with sound, and specifically with the sound of the electric guitar. Whereas jazz great and electric guitar pioneer Charlie Christian was lauded for playing guitar “like a horn,” it was largely through the efforts of Les Paul that the electric guitar assumed its own distinctive sound. In his efforts to master both the technical elements of guitar playing and the technological trappings of his instrument, Paul combined technological and musical creativity in a way that few other twentieth-century musicians could match.

To be clear, Les Paul did not invent the electric guitar, as many people seem to think. Nor did he invent the solid body electric, at least not in any single-handed fashion. He was one of a small number of guitar makers—Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby were the others—who came up with the solid body design at roughly the same time. Paul may have gotten there first with his creation, the Log, which he built in 1941, but it was Fender who would issue the first commercially manufactured solid body electric later in the decade, setting the stage for Paul's famous namesake, the Gibson Les Paul, which first emerged in 1952.

Guitar historians and music critics alike have routinely claimed that the solid body electric was almost custom made for the sound of rock ‘n’ roll that was just beyond the horizon. They base this claim on the notion that with the solid body, the guitar became capable of generating whole new realms of sonic mayhem via the distortion and feedback that all lovers of rock guitar have come to know and love. Typical is the description given by John Rockwell in a 1976 Rolling Stone article, that after the commercial advent of the solid body, “an instrument was available that was inexpensive … easily transportable, simple to play … and capable of megasymphonic amounts of noise” (59).

In hindsight this is true. By eliminating the intrusive, unwanted resonances produced by the hollow body of earlier electric models, the solid body electric made it possible to play an electric guitar at higher levels of volume and distortion while still maintaining some control over the sound. But not until the 1960s would these qualities fully take hold in the music of the day. When Les Paul, Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby were all working on the solid body electric in the 1930s and 1940s, they were not trying to make the guitar noisier. Paul, in particular, was trying to do just the opposite. His goal was to achieve the purest tone possible, which would come about through the elimination of unwanted noise.

In the early 1930s, while living in Chicago, Paul began to recognize that “when you've got the top [of the guitar] vibrating and a string vibrating, you've got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can't be the string, because that's making the sound.” This conflict led Paul to search for a guitar with a more stable surface: “So in 1934 I asked the Larson Brothers—the instrument makers in Chicago—to build me a guitar with a 1/2” maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy. They told me it wouldn't vibrate. I told them I didn't want it to vibrate, because I was going to put two pickups on it” (Sievert 50). The two-pickup design was as odd as the solid body concept by the conventions of the day, and both give evidence of the extent to which Paul was thinking of the electric guitar in very different terms from most instrument makers of the period. He foresaw the possibility of an instrument in which the tone generated by the electric signal could be more effectively isolated from the acoustic properties of the guitar.

“The Log,” Paul's 1941 solid body prototype, remains one of the most unusual instruments in electric guitar history. It was essentially a 4 x 4” strip of wood with an Epiphone neck and pickups designed by Paul, but the instrument was so unsightly that he added “wings” cut from the sides of an acoustic jazz guitar to normalize its appearance. Strange though it may have looked, the Log was a perfectly functional instrument with a rich tone and greater sustain than other available guitars of the period. Over the years Paul used it to record a number of songs; and, recognizing its design as something of a breakthrough in terms of sound, in 1946 he tried to sell the concept behind it to the Gibson company—and was flatly refused by M.H. Berlin, head of Gibson's parent corporation, Chicago Musical Instruments. At the time there was no perceived market for a solid body guitar, especially not one that looked like a “broomstick” with a pickup. It would be another six years before the Gibson Les Paul would see the light of day and become—along with Fender's Telecaster and Stratocaster models—the standard against which all other solid body electric guitars were measured.

That Gibson, the leading United States guitar manufacturer of the time, decided not only to enlist Paul's endorsement but actually name their first production solid body for the guitarist attests to Paul's stature among guitarists in the early 1950s. By the time the Gibson Les Paul hit the market in 1952, Paul was one of the most popular recording artists in the United States, in tandem with his wife, Mary Ford. Paul's solid body electric guitar was integral to the music that Les and Mary made but was only one factor. At least as important, if not more so, was Paul's other great innovation: his mastery of multiple track recording.

Paul's recording methods, like his solid body innovations, first emerged during the 1930s. He played along with the sound of his own guitar in private for almost a decade before applying some of the techniques he'd developed to a hit Bing Crosby song, “It's Been a Long, Long Time,” which became a number one single in 1945. At Crosby's encouragement, Paul began to focus more attention upon his recording experiments, building a small studio in the garage of his Hollywood home. Here, Paul devised what became known as his “new sound,” testing different styles of microphone placement, altering the tape speed of his recording equipment to achieve unique sonic effects, and, most significantly, producing overdubbed recordings of considerable clarity and lack of surface noise. Paul recorded tracks onto shellac disks (this was before tape was a readily available medium), and overlaid each new track onto the previous ones, so that no single track was retrievable once recorded. A mistake meant starting over from scratch. As Paul put it, “You can never go back—you can only keep going on. So you just don't make a mistake” (Peeples 17).

The first fruit of his experimentation came in 1947. “Lover,” a Rodgers and Hart composition, became in Paul's hands a multi-tracked orchestra of eight guitars, all played by Paul. Describing the piece, Paul explained that “until ‘Lover,’ I'd never been able to combine all my inventions and recording techniques into one bag of tricks—to use the delay, echo, reverb, phasing, flanging, sped-up sounds, muted picking and everything else on a multiple recording” (Peeples 29). On the strength of the track, he secured a contract with Capitol records, whose A&R head Jim Conkling expressed amazement at Paul's feats as a recording engineer: “He was feeding in the bass end and top end of the scale all at the same time, which was a feat I never understood” (Shaughnessy 142). Capitol's own recording engineers were similarly puzzled, and Paul's technological expertise became a key selling point as he began his career with the company.

Not until 1949 did Paul begin to record with Ford. Her smooth, crooning vocal style suited Paul's pure guitar tone. Together they projected a sound that was warm, intimate, and inviting, as though they were not on stage but in a room with the listener, sharing something personal. This element of intimate sound matched the image that the couple portrayed. As early as 1949, they appeared on radio as Les Paul and Mary Ford “at home,” a motif that would define their public image throughout the 1950s (Waksman 61–63). For Paul and Ford, home was at once that “intimate” space where romantic sentiment could flourish and the place where they made their music, using an expanded home studio in their Mahwah, New Jersey residence. Home was also the setting within which most of their audience would encounter them. Performing over radio and television, or having their records played over hi-fidelity sound systems, Les and Mary would play from one home to another, publicly transmitting a version of domestic life built around the incorporation of electric technologies into the comfortable privacy of the middle-class home.

As someone who refashioned the design and function of the electric guitar, Les Paul made the instrument something akin to a household item. His pursuit of a pure electric tone led to some of the most significant design innovations in the history of the instrument, and made its sound more adaptable to a range of recording and performing situations. As someone who seized the possibilities of multiple track recording earlier than just about anyone, Les Paul dramatically revised the way we hear sound and the ways that the sounds we hear are made. Either one of these innovations, by itself, would have been enough to ensure Les Paul a prominent place in popular music history. That he accomplished them both attests to the incredible imagination of a musician who heard possibilities in music technology that few others were able to hear, and who had the skill to turn those possibilities into actualities. People could listen to and enjoy the results of Paul's achievements, but perhaps more importantly, people could use them, and could continue the work that he started. They could continue creating new sounds.